Aggressively Neutral: The FCC Drops The Hammer

The FCC has announced that it hereafter will regulate the internet as a public utility.

If you are someone who has worked for net neutrality over the years, today is Mardi Gras. The FCC has announced that it hereafter will regulate the internet as a public utility. It also ruled that it will limit severely any move by individual states to keep cities and towns from building out their own public municipal broadband networks. Y'all did a helluva job.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The F.C.C.'s yearlong path to issuing net rules to ensure an open Internet precipitated an extraordinary level of political involvement for a regulatory ruling from grass-roots populism to the White House. The F.C.C. received more than four million comments, about a quarter of them generated through a campaign organized by Fight for the Future, a nonprofit advocacy group. The overwhelming majority of the comments supported common-carrier style rules, like those in the order the commission approved on Thursday.

Naturally, there are skunks at the garden party. Congressional conservative Republicans continue to believe that everyone out in the country is as stupid as they would like them to be.

Republicans in Congress were slow to react, and initially misread the public mood. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas portrayed the F.C.C. rule-making process as a heavy-handed liberal initiative, "Obamacare for the Internet."

And congressional "moderate" Republicans are ready with a proposal that will guarantee net neutrality while making sure that net neutrality can never be actually implemented.

In January, Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, began circulating legislation that embraced the principles of net neutrality, banning paid-for priority lanes and blocking or throttling any web content. But it would also prohibit the F.C.C. from issuing regulations to achieve those goals.

Why was Wheeler's face chosen for this particular image? The individuals posting the images, told The Daily Caller they became involved in such activism to help "move the needle" and wanted to "make [Wheeler] somebody people know, because nobody knows who he is unless you're a wonk."

In announcing the FCC's decision, Wheeler, the chairman, and a guy who used to be a telecom lobbyist, did not appear to be intimidated by the paste-pot patriots of Washington.

Broadband networks are the most powerful and pervasive connectivity in history. Broadband isreshaping our economy and recasting the patterns of our lives. Every day, we rely on high-speed connectivity to do our jobs, access entertainment, keep up with the news, express our views, and stay in touch with friends and family. There are three simple keys to our broadband future. Broadband networks must be fast. Broadband networks must be fair. Broadband networks must be open. We know from the history of previous networks that both human nature and economic opportunism act to encourage network owners to become gatekeepers that prioritize their interests above the interests of their users. As the D.C. Circuit observed in the Verizon decision and as the public record affirms, broadband providers have both the economic incentive and the technological capability to abuse their gatekeeper position.

In other words, because he used to lobby for those jamokes, Wheeler knows what telecom goliaths will do if you allow them to self-regulate, which is pretty much what any American corporation will do if you allow it to self-regulate. It will screw the country with the country's pants on. Further,

The Order also includes a general conduct rule that can be used to stop new and novel threats to the Internet. That means there will be basic ground rules and a referee on the field to enforce them. If an action hurts consumers, competition, or innovation, the FCC will have the authority to throw the flag. Under the Order we adopt today, open Internet protections would - for the first time - apply equally to both fixed and mobile networks. Mobile wireless networks account for 55 percent of Internet usage. We cannot have two sets of Internet protections - one fixed and one mobile - when the difference is increasingly anachronistic to consumers.

Of course, now that we've all done our happy dance, let's remember that these orders are vulnerable to the various land-mines in robes that have been planted throughout the federal court system, and to President Ted Cruz's few appointees to the FCC. But, for the moment, let's celebrate a win for four million Top Commenters on the FCC website that have produced a system of Intertoobz that allows general access to vital educational materials.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.